AVATARVARO
To be the body without the mind.
To reflect with passive distance on the actions performed by the body, as if they were not one's own.
To experience proximity to another person freed from the isolation of the “I”.
In the meeting of avatars there is complicity and trust, a twinkle of an eye, a silent undertone.
Whilst the operators' isolated “I”s desperately attempt to overcome the undefinable divide between them the avatars are already there, they are already mobilizing.
They have found that they have something in common, in the midst of freedom from power and responsibility. .
And perhaps this experience of community is about (for once) ending up on the "right" side in the great simplified Revolutionary drama - without hypocracy or divided identities.
In all of this, the hand-over becomes a happy one, like a romantic form of apathy.
Why do we want to hand ourselves over like this?
Is it not enough to be spectators in the society and time we are living in, do we also want to be spectators to our own lives, to the actions performed by our own bodies? Maybe it is the expression of a generations impotence in relation to the global problems and power-structures that define their lives. Why are we supposed to take responsibility of something we have no power over, of problems we haven't created?
Or perhaps it isn't a time-specific behavior, rather the opposite; it is this readiness to mental slavery and freedom of responsibility desired by our parents and their parents that have shaped the power-structures that we are now living with.
In that case, we should rather free ourselves from romantic notions from apathy.
Its all the same in the end though - we decide guiltily and throw ourselves into a liberation from all responsibility.
There is an image of an installation by Anish Kapoor - in the middle of the floor in a completely white room is a perfectly black and flat circle. (See Descent into Limbo, 1992) (1).
Except its not a circle but a hole, a hole that seems to open beyond the room, beyond the frontier constituted by the floor, wall or installation.
On the other side of the hole is the nothingness, a great dark dissolution of the "I". The void.
It is horrifying and seductive, and inviting.
The Operator has the power through agreement, and we can assume that there is also an agreement for how this power may be used.
Thereby we have crossed to the other side of the frontier, we have handed ourselves over and the discussion has shifted towards what comes next.
Marina Abramovic made a performance in 1974, Rythm 0, in which she handed over the power to the audience. She had placed 72 objects on a table, amongst others a rose, honey,
a feather, a whip a gun and a bullet. The audience was invited to use these tools on the artist, as they chose, for pain or pleasure.
The session lasted for 6 hours and when the time was up she walked of the stage bleeding.
She is reported to have said "What I learned was that ...if you leave it up to the audience, they can kill you"(2).
The audience that caresses with a feather or loads a bullet into the gun hides behind both Operator and Avatar, and the relation between them is least to say ambivalent.
Both can view what is happening with distance; one because s-he does not make the decisions that rule his/her actions,
and the other because s-he always maintains the physical distance to any potential consequences that may come as result of these actions.
What comes next. Through the darkness.
Perhaps the only insight is that there is only more darkness, and if we hand over the power it will further or later be used against us.
Or perhaps - apart from the various monsters of humanity - there are caverns deep down in the dark, in the shapeless, blunt betweenspace where only the Avatars can fit.
And perhaps that is the strength of the avatars. Beyond the competition of the "I"s they are gathering an underground army. ;-))
(1) Descent into Limbo, 1992, Museum de Pont, Tilburg, NL, Groen, Rianne,
http://riannegroen.blogspot.com/2011/01/into-unknown-void-in-contemporary-art.html
(2) A Daneri, et al., (eds.), Marina Abramović, (Charta, 2002), p 29
